Half-Brother
by Last of the Loneliness
Summary: Vale certainly appears idyllic, but there is always more than meets the eye. A bastard child is scorned and abandons his village, desperate to find his destiny and leave his ghosts behind. But when his ghosts are others' heroes, how can he avoid them for long?


**Hello, everyone! Some of you may have read Brother, How Did It Come To This, and know me from that, or this story may have simply intrigued you. To that end, I feel like a disclaimer of sorts is necessary.**

_**Many of the canon characters will be, in this fic, represented in a very different light from the way they are seen in the games. I do not mean to crush characters I dislike or say that these aspects of these characters are canon. I like many of these characters personally. How the main character relates to them simply informs how they are seen here. With that in mind, I present to you...**_

* * *

Half-Brother

His memories of his father were vague and half-formed. He hadn't even known that the man who featured in them was his father until years later—until his mother was sick and close enough to death that she didn't want to pass on without sharing her secret.

In all of his memories, his father was unsmiling. Either panicked, unsure, or simply serious and harsh—he had never seen a smile grace his father's face.

"_Kyle, please, look at him, hug him…"_

"_That child is not my son!"_

_His mother was pleading, begging, the usual fire in her grey eyes missing as she pleaded with the father of her only son. Kyle turned away, his face marked with lines of anger and stubbornness._

"_My only son is Isaac, and my only lover Dora! You—you…what happened between us was nothing!"_

It had taken him several years to realize that he hated his father, this man he knew very little about. His mother, Irine, was very protective of him, for reasons he didn't quite understand until she was gone.

"_Mother, why doesn't the brown-haired man visit anymore?"_

_She paused while combing his hair, and he couldn't see her face, for she was behind him, but the strange pitch of her voice sounded as if she was holding back tears._

"_He doesn't have any reason left to, I suppose."_

"_Who was that man?"_

_The innocence of a child was the bane of someone more worldly, someone who had no desire to speak about those matters._

"_He…he was just a friend, Caleb."_

Irine was never well-known in Vale. Even a small town has its celebrities, and those who weren't flew low under the radar. She was not particularly skilled in Psynergy, and though she was exceptionally intelligent, her views never agreed with those of the elders. She read to pass the time, but Caleb wondered why—the books seemed to make her sadder, not happier.

If the healer ruled against a matter, that was that. It was a very rare case when he stepped in to resolve such a matter (usually such duties were the job of the mayor), but when one of his favored students was accused of something, the healer stepped in.

Kyle was one such student.

"She coerced him."

"She wooed him, knowing he was engaged—shameful!"

"Poor Dora, poor Kyle…"

They sided with Kyle.

_But it wasn't like that, was it? _Caleb thought, day after day, watching his mother waste away. At first he sought any means to get out of the house. But leaving opened himself to ridicule from the other children. He couldn't learn with them, or play with them, and he stayed home. The only time Caleb felt safe to play were those grey, wet days when all the other children were inside. He learned to avoid that house up the way, where that young boy with sandy-blonde hair stared at him through the window. The memory of when the brown-haired man had emerged and yelled at him never to play there again was still stark in his mind.

"_My father told me you're a bastard, and your mother's a liar."_

_Garet was the worst of them, day after day, a red-haired bully. He was the primary reason why Caleb avoided the other children. _

"_My mother's not a liar," Caleb said quietly, but Garet somehow still heard him._

"_Are you calling my father a liar, then, bastard? Are you calling Isaac's dad a liar?" Garet never spoke quietly. His words were always delivered loudly, accompanied with a sharp fist to the face, and this time was no exception._

_Caleb lay on the ground, his ears ringing, as Garet stood over him. The other children were laughing. "Hey, Isaac, come hit him for your father!"_

"_What is the meaning of this?" Irine demanded, appearing behind the children as suddenly as an angel. She hugged Caleb to her, while an aura of Psynergy glowed around her. She was a Mars adept—quick to anger. "How dare you bully him?"_

"_You're a liar!" Garet chanted, backing away from the woman, but the malicious gleam in his eyes was still there._

"_You'll have to do better than that, little brute," Irine said, standing and turning away from the children. "Come, Caleb. We're going home."_

"Whore."

_Irine turned slowly._

Garet was quick enough to squeal about how he received the burns, minor as they were, and the village was in an uproar once again, almost as large as when Irine had claimed Kyle as the father of her son. Disgrace, horror, scandal—Irine couldn't leave the house. Caleb was forced to do the shopping. He didn't mind—he had heard the things people screamed at his mother in the streets.

She fell ill after that, so weak that she couldn't leave bed. Caleb hated seeing his mother waste away like that, her black hair spread out over her pillow, her skin with an unnatural pallor.

She died a few weeks before the storm. Her burial was attended by next to no one. A few villagers with some pity in their hearts gave Caleb various items of food and money to keep him by. He was old enough, it was deemed, to live by himself at fifteen.

* * *

He had inherited his father's earth-based Psynergy over his mother's fire, but he wasn't skilled in it. He couldn't effectively make plants grow, and the earthquakes he could summon were barely strong enough to feel. When the boulder fell, no one came to ask him for help. He fled to the plaza, alone.

And then Kyle was dead, Jenna's family along with him.

Caleb took a secret, vindictive pride in knowing that he hadn't grieved at all. The rest of the village mourned, seemingly mocking his mother, forgotten, deep in the earth. He could barely even bring himself to pity Jenna—she was one of Isaac's friends.

* * *

Almost a year after the storm, Kraden came to the village. It caused a stir in a sleepy hamlet like Vale, that a visitor, especially one as knowledgeable as Kraden, would come there. Secretly Caleb longed to speak with the sage, but he seemed constantly occupied with the elders and the mayor, and Caleb contented himself with staying closeted up in the house, as usual.

Isaac, Garet, and Jenna began studying Psynergy under the old sage. That was also the talk of the village. The two poor children, having lost their parents, rising from under their duress to train themselves harder, their friend standing beside them.

It was a touching story, without a doubt.

One day, when Caleb was down in the plaza, buying food, Isaac entered the store. It was a shock—the two rarely ran into each other, mainly because Caleb rarely left the house. Isaac stood in the doorway for a few seconds, staring awkwardly at his half-brother, before he seemed to decide to act as though nothing was amiss.

"Urm, I just need a few antidotes, please," he said, clearing his throat as he walked to the counter. The shop's attendant smiled sympathetically at him.

"For your Psynergy training, I suppose? People say you're working very hard at it. Is it because you think the reason your father died that day was because you weren't strong enough?"

Isaac gave Caleb a sideways glance. He looked like a rabbit, on a road as a cart came toward it, unsure whether to run and frozen to the spot.

"Something along those lines…"

"I know how you feel, Isaac," Caleb said, more loudly than necessary. "After all, I lost my father that night too."

The shopkeeper froze as well. The silence was horrifically tense before Caleb turned on his heel and strode from the shop.

* * *

The sky was stained as red as blood, and even though he was reluctant to ever leave his shelter, Caleb joined the other citizens of Vale in gathering near the base of Mount Aleph, staring up at Sol Sanctum as lava rolled slowly down the sides of the mountain. It was a truly terrifying sight. The others were muttering about Isaac, Garet, Jenna, and Kraden, trapped in the mountain, while Caleb simply hoped that the lava didn't destroy the village. As awful as a home it might have been, it was still a home.

Garet and Isaac emerged from the Sanctum to the cheers and welcoming cries of the whole village before disappearing into the healer's hall. Over an hour passed before they emerged, and the news spread like wildfire through the village.

Kraden and Jenna kidnapped. The Elemental Stars stolen. The return of Alchemy eminent. Isaac and Garet the two heroes chosen to pursue the thieves.

The lava did not hit the village, and the next day the two chosen ones left, all the villagers turning out to watch them go.

All, that is, but Caleb.

He had packed the few belongings he cared about, as well as some food, into a sack. This was his only time to escape—the borders of Vale were usually watched day and night. He snuck carefully out of his house and up to Kraden's. He had never been there before, but what interested him were Kraden's books. He grabbed as many as his pack would permit, books on Alchemy, Psynergy, and engineering, on history, and culture, and peoples…

He left Kraden's house in a messier state than when he had entered and nearly ran past the house. There was a fence to the south, blocking off an unstable, land-slide area. It was his only chance of exit, with the lower plaza so crowded by the villagers.

Caleb barely looked back as he vaulted the fence of his hometown and set out for his own adventures—for his own life. _Goodbye, Mother. I miss you._

But his past was behind him now, and his future beckoned, broad and clear.

* * *

**A/N: Sooo here we have our prologue. This story is based off of a bit of dialogue in the games themselves. If you speak to all the villagers before going to Sol Sanctum, one of them mentions that his father was killed the day the boulder fell. Yet, in TLA, Kraden says that nobody died that day. Using this as a springboard, I played with the idea that Kyle had an illegitimate child. This story is the result of those musings.**

**Caleb's name is directly related to Isaac's in that they are both biblical names. Even if Isaac is just the American name, I thought it seemed fitting. (To call him Cain or Abel would have been, well, a bit over-the-top.)**

**It is somewhat AU, but the events and characters will remain largely the same, but for the way they are portrayed. I also don't have very many specific ideas, and I feel it is only safe to warn you that my updating schedule is less than timely. If you would like to keep reading, wonderful!**

**Please review with your thoughts, good, bad, or otherwise, and with any critiques you may have!**


End file.
